Defense, Revenge & Rebellion

On this New Year’s day of 2013, a leaden winter sky symbolizes a bleak outlook for our continued prosperity and freedom.  We have been deliberately derailed from our primacy.   Like many of my correspondents, I feel something between political depression and despair.  

Defense is a basic instinct linked to our survival.  The Lord may be my shepherd, but I’m not a sheep.  Like any other normal human, I’m motivated to react strongly to any threat against my person, my family, or my essential property.  There are limits to what I will do, however.  I will act to remove the threat, but no more.  Once the threat is gone, I will stop reacting to it.  I will not nuke a city to stop a burglar.  I will not kill a thug when a fence will be enough.  There is a balance, a proportion, to defense.  Any act exceeding our concept of proportionate action is an affront to our sense of justice.

Self defense is a reaction to present danger.  We are not considering war and the strategies of war, which are more like chess than instinctive reactions.  Defense is self limiting.  The right to self defense is built into our system of justice, our laws and our Constitution.  It is an accepted part of our culture.

Revenge is very different.  Revenge is taken after the fact.  The goal of revenge is the fear it creates in an enemy and perhaps the satisfaction and status it produces for the avenger.   It has no limits in time or in proportion.  It may take a generation or a genocide.  

In tribal cultures. revenge is an obligation on the survivors of a murder or a grievous insult.  Now, law supplants the obligation for revenge of this sort, provided it is just.  In effect, society has assumed the obligation of clan revenge under the name of “victim’s rights”.  In the sentencing portion of trials, the very people who would be obligated to seek revenge are seated in the court to testify and to hear the sentence.  Where justice is even-handed, this kind of solitary revenge is no longer a dominant feature of our culture.  

Revenge may be a solitary act, but it is usually on behalf of a group, such as a gang of thugs or mafia.  Revenge is the fundamental act of a mafia culture.  In such a culture, even-handed justice is inconvenient.  It tends to trap the mafia ruling class.

Obama’s former Chief of Staff, Rahm Emmanuel, was quoted as saying, “If they hit you, hit them back twice as hard.”  This is revenge, and Chicago-style politics is based on a mafia structure.  There is a Capo with his lieutenants or a President with his czars. The gang territory is strictly divided.  Each division must pay tribute to the top.   No division sees the big picture.  Strategic information is on a “need to know” basis.  Disputes and decisions between divisions are made and enforced by the Capo.

If any one thinks this is the only way to rule, consider King Arthur’s Round Table - a collegial forum of equals.  Consider the intent of the Founders in creating the US Senate as just such a collegial forum.  There are many such egalitarian bodies in the world: the House of Lords, the U.N. Security Council, even the Loya Jurga in Afghanistan.   They all depend on the good will of the members.  They all assume that certain rules of fair play and conduct will prevail.  They have  Rules of Order that give each member a fair hearing and prevent chaos..

Unfortunately, egalitarian groups have a weakness. In order to function, they need a certain level of trust among their members.  That is the essence of a collegial relationship.  When this trust is broken, factions appear, insecurities overcome common  sense, and a struggle for hierarchical power ensues.  The round table devolves to become another mafia.  

The authors of the Constitution understood this quite well.  That document contains checks and balances to prevent an early decay of the egalitarian republic.  Those checks and balances raised the stability threshold so high that it took decades of clever subversion to create instability sufficient to bring on Chicago-style endemic corruption. 

It took the systematic destruction of values, religion and family life.  It required the deification of a new and abstract entity called “the Collective Good”.  The Capo is the only person who is allowed to interpret the Collective Good (not God).  He is the High Priest.  Any and all acts of confiscation or redistribution are justifiable on behalf of the Collective Good. The end, as interpreted by the High Priest, justifies the means.  That is the new definition of “fairness”.  Any rational argument to the contrary will get beaten down with “fairness” and “Collective Good”.  

The ordinary individual and his or her values, speech, and religion are no longer of much value.  They must be sacrificed to the Collective Good.  Politically correct speech is a recognition of collective values.  Censorship is a new kind of public ethic.  There are certain words I will not write here because they would trigger mindless vengeance in a few readers.  Acting on behalf of their group, they will undertake acts of revenge, even though they would not be able show any real damages.  The revenge motif has replaced the concept of individual rights.  We used to say, “Live and let live”.  Not any more.

The first act of the devil is to destroy trust among well-meaning people.  Creative collaborations, joyous celebrations, spontaneous acts of charity, all vanish.  “Why should I help those  S.O.B.’s ?  They never did a thing for me.  I wouldn’t trust them any further than I could throw them.”  You hear this every day now.  

It used to be that those same words would mark you as a misanthrope - a  Scrooge, or worse.  Good folks would cross the street to avoid you.  Not any more.  It doesn’t get a comment.  

In a mafia, those in power are threatened by the possibility of revenge against them.  They believe in revenge as a basic human motive and cannot tolerate it being a two way street.   Justice in the courts is scarce. Revenge is undergoing a revival.   It doesn’t take much evidence of corruption and privilege to generate animosity among the common people.  The motive for revenge is always present in a mafia culture.  The lieutenants or the soldiers may recruit their own constituents at any time and rise up against the Capo.  Therefore the people must be disarmed.  They must be made subservient, dependent on the hierarchy for every little thing - food, housing, cheap cell phones.  All blessings must flow from the top.  All violence must belong to the State.  People cannot be trusted (to just shut up and do what they are told).

At some point the sandpile of power and corruption topples.  Opponents spring up like grass in the midst of desolation.  In a mafia, a strong opponent stands out like a wolf among hyenas.  It’s only a matter of time before the old sandpile begins to slide and the wolf makes his move.

Rebellion is the mass act of a new Collective Good against an old Collective Good.  Sacrifices must be made in the name of the new Collective Good. We may want to believe that it is the spontaneous uprising of a suppressed minority against an oppressive mafia tyranny.  That is the usual recruiting slogan, but it is rarely true.  Most rebellions are simply a recursion of the historic cycle: power, corruption, decay, rebellion, repeat.  It’s the karma of a mafia culture.  

One exception to this bad karma occurred on this continent in 1776.  That rebellion “lit the lamp beside the golden door”.   It is nothing short of a miracle that it did not result in  a new King George (King George Washington the First), and that it lasted 236 years.  We were incredibly lucky.  However, the karmic cycle is come round again. People are tired of the irrationality, corruption and incompetence of the current mafia and the self-appointed Capo.  It is only a matter of time until the sandpile slips and the wolf pack goes after the hyenas.

Will we be so lucky the next time?

Ken Brody Jan 2 2013

To Keep and Bear Arms

“A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

And so the framers of the Constitution enshrined this right in our Second Amendment.  

One of the arguments against the right of the individuals to carry arms is the initial phrase of this amendment, “A well-regulated militia...”.  Is it possible that the right to bear arms was to be  relegated to some militia or police force and not to individuals?  Or was the right given to individuals, who, on their own initiative, formed such a militia?  Here we have the classic arguments of the collectivists and statists vs. the conservatives. Is the right to self defense a fundamental responsibility of individuals, or a collective right of their governments?  

The Federalist papers argued both sides of the issue.  On the one hand, no reasonable person would casually entrust his security to another person, nor would he lean on his neighbor for security, any more than he would freeload off his neighbor for support.  In the first instance, he would be shirking his duty to those under his care.  In the second, he would be a fool.  The founders also recognized that some individuals would be rogues, not protectors, and these criminals would take what they wanted by force of arms.  Therefore, every capable person (plural = people) was individually responsible for his own protection and each ought to bear arms if at all possible.  

Please note that the right to bear arms is directly related to the notion of self-defense.  It has nothing to do with “sporting”, hunting or other recreational or food-gathering activities.  The classification of guns into “sporting” and “military’ categories is just political spin, a fiction, not a law.

Of course, there were then, as there are now, criminal gangs, warlike natives, and inimical foreign governments.  The founders of this country recognized that any realistic security against groups of bad guys required that the citizens form their own defensive groups, or militias.  There were no Lords who had armies of serfs, knights and archers to protect the land.  Militiamen were drawn from among the common individuals that owned arms and gave up their harvest time or family duties to fight.  They met in ale houses and public meeting rooms and elected leaders, sought subscriptions for support, and trained for their own defense.   Only later were the duties of a militia relegated to more permanent organizations staffed with people who were not required to harvest crops or tend to other business.  We call those “police” and “armies”.   Benjamin Franklin wrote in his memoirs about raising an army.  The French were invading from Canada.  Franklin called on his colleagues for voluntary subscriptions.  He served as leader more than once, even though he had no relevant training.  He also campaigned for a regular standing army, having lost a fortune  provisioning a volunteer army from his own pocket.

Therefore, we see the right to keep and bear arms was BOTH individual AND collective.  There was never any divisive interpretation along those lines until recently.

What about the drunkard, the occasional mental defective, or the deliberately malevolent?  Were they “allowed” to bear arms?  Didn’t they do great harm?  

In the absence of modern psychological profiling and pills, most of these misfits were simply shunned, ignored and excluded.  Every town had a few.  Yes, there were duels, jealousies, greedy manipulations and axe murderers like Lizzy Borden.  The general attitude was that the crime was punished, not the weapon.  No one thought to put the musket or the axe on trial.  Intent was, and is, essential to the deed, and no judge ascribed intent to inanimate objects.  Arson kills people, but no one seriously wants to eliminate fire.  We punish the arsonist.

If they could have identified those persons prone to commit violence by some sort of test, as we propose today, what would the founders have thought of that idea?  By reference to the Federalist arguments over a “nation of laws, not men” we can see their likely argument:

Who could be trusted to devise and administer such a test?  Would some angel descend from Heaven with a perfect means of judgement in hand?  And if he did, why would we not administer that same test to those in government, who could do irreparable harm to so many?  Perhaps we could then give up the idea of imperfect people ruling themselves and go back to the divine right of a perfect king?  After the revolution, a majority of governors actually elected George Washington as King.  He refused.  Washington was horrified to be considered any kind of King or royalty or to be in a position to create a dynasty. He cited the Rule of Law as ascendant over the rule of mere men.  There is no such perfect test of propriety, and the inalienable rights of individuals remain ascendant over the rule of imperfect beings.

The founders planned for a nation to be ruled by imperfect individuals. They would equally reject the notion of prior restraint based on some kind of test.  Any such test would be more dangerous than the alternative.

If there was some such test for a prior restraint to be applied to violent individuals, why restrict them from just firearms?  Why not knives and axes?  In fact, if they are such a danger to society, why not just lock them away from the rest of us?  Why not create a Bedlam of the dangerous, a system of high-security prisons to make all the rest of us perfectly safe?  How are we, then, to defend against a malevolent individual who lies in disguise, never revealing his true self until just the right time to commit major mayhem?  You see, prior restraint doesn’t work.  We have to go by observable acts or we threaten the entire idea of justice.   

Malevolent individuals commit many small, indicative acts that could get them recognized and punished.  That is how we ought to find and judge them.  

Given a law for prior restraint, an ambitious, corrupt governor might chose to label his opponents as dangerous and have them all locked away...

What is enough firepower for self defense? Does it require guns?  Handguns?  Automatic weapons?  Is there anything in the literature of the founders that says guns must have a limited capacity or firepower, or they are not suitable for private ownership?  No, there isn’t.  

When your self defense is adequate, you have enough weapons.  When it is insufficient against other individuals, or your militia is insufficiently armed for its purpose, you need better weapons.  Short of the weapons of mass destruction, or where indiscriminate use necessarily entails “collateral damage” there ought to be no prohibited weapons  for individuals.  Somewhere between machine guns and missiles there is a line imposed by cost, training and plain caution, beyond which they become part of a military arsenal.  The framers were certainly aware of that and set checks and balances regarding the funding of an army and the declaration of war, so that the military is used for the defense of the people and not for their demise.

What about those countries that do not allow individuals to own firearms?  Aren’t they secure with their police and laws?  No, they aren’t.  They still lock their doors at night, fence their pastures and brand their cattle.  They carry sticks, slings, and machetes.  These are sufficient for self defense against all but firearms and government thugs.  Against these they are deliberately kept defenseless and they do suffer.  They are subjects in a quasi-feudal society at the mercy of their rulers, not citizens.

In every case where a people have been disarmed by regulation or limitation, crime has increased over time.  It is certainly safer to commit crimes against unarmed people.  Just as certainly, it is easier to control a population that cannot fight back...

...And that is the last and most important issue.  In spite of the checks and balances of the Constitution, the founders understood that tyranny will eventually rise, whether it is by force or by stealth, and that the right of self defense may ultimately be used against inimical governments.  A nation founded on revolution does not soon forget that a revolution requires arms in the hands of the people.  The first act of tyranny will be to infringe that right.

Who Owns Your Property?

We call it pride of ownership.  It’s such a powerful motivator that we are willing to put up with insuperable obstacles and a killing job to buy a house, a decent car, a big screen TV.  

Sonny Soldano (not his real name) lived in an apartment for years.  Every time he paid his rent, which went up every year, he wondered why he was dropping such a wad of cash on someone else’s property.  So he put away a few bucks after his wife got a raise and bought a house.  He paid $300,000 for his ten year old house in a decent middle-class neighborhood with acceptable schools.  He put up $60,000 in savings and took out a $240,000 30-year variable-rate mortgage at 4% for the first 3 years. His mortgage is $1146 per month, which was only $140 more than he was paying for rent.  On top of that, the mortgaging bank wants to escrow his tax payments.  Since he lives in a nice suburban school district supported by school bonds, he has real estate taxes of $8400 per year, so the bank adds $700 per month to his mortgage bill.  He also had to pay $6500 when he bought the house, for title, fees, termite inspection, points on the loan and a myriad of other charges, but he paid those out of cash.

So now his lovely house is $1846 per month, plus the $66,500 he took out of his pocket to buy it, which might have earned some interest or appreciation if invested.  Sonny walks out of the settlement meeting at the title company office feeling like Atlas with a huge weight on his shoulders, while everyone around him congratulates him on his new home.  His wife sees a nest for the kids, his friends come to make housewarming gifts and he tries to ignore the 30 pages of legal fine print where he signed his life away.  Soon he has his furniture set up, his car in the garage, and stacks of cardboard boxes everywhere that he has no time to empty, because he is now working overtime hoping for a raise.

Sonny figures he will make up for all this with the tax deduction for his mortgage interest, which Obama will try to eliminate if he can, and prays for appreciation on the house, which is merely inflation due to Federal Reserve monetary policy.

Sonny is a “homeowner” now.

But what, exactly, does he own?

He has $60,000 worth of equity in his house, less whatever he owes on the taxes.  But he has no control over this equity.  Unlike an equivalent investment in the stock market, he cannot sell it - he lives there.  It may or may not appreciate, depending on the housing market and the economy, and all he can do is ride out these waves.  Every month he must plow back $1846, of which only $346 goes into his equity.  This is a saving plan where the homeowner pays the bank to keep his money, not the other way around.

He can’t sell this house to anyone until all the taxes, water and sewer fees, utilities and other liens are resolved or paid, and then the bank gets paid on the proceeds before Sonny does. He is last on the payee list.   If this were a bond or a stock, he would not be last on the payee list.

He can’t plant alfalfa on his front lawn, put up a tower for his ham radio or graze goats in the back yard because these are all against the town ordinances or the covenants and restrictions that go with the land under “his” house.  About all he is allowed to do is paint the inside in puce and apricot, and even there the realtor will warn him it must be beige in order to resell it.  

So what makes this “his” house?  He can’t do anything he wants to do with it.

The terms of the mortgage effectively give control over the property to the bank.  The original bank resold the mortgage note to CitiBank but kept the lucrative mortgage processing and billing.  That allows them to hold the tax escrow and pay no interest on it  and collect any late payments and foreclosure fees if he defaults.  They also get a percent of the payments.  CitiBank chopped up his mortgage in a hash with many others and issued an asset based security against the mashup.  Now a variety of banks, investment companies and sovereign funds outside the U.S. own pieces of Sonny’s house.

So what makes this “his” house?  A lot of big players have more in it than he has.  All he has is possession, and he can be evicted.

The town Sonny lives in issues school bonds.  Legally, these are bonds backed by the town’s real estate base.  Real estate taxes are a prior lien when push comes to shove.  Because of this prior lien, the town actually owns the house, and if the town defaults on its bonds, the bond holder can “take” Sonny’s house and sell it, along with whole tracts of “private” property, at auction.  There is no way Sonny can escape this town lien, even if he pays his tax every month.  Look at the tax lien clause in any municipal real-estate backed bond.

With all these liens and mortgages, not to mention easements, rights of way, riparian rights, covenants and restriction, EPA regulations, and eminent domain seizures, it is obvious Sonny is living at the dispensation of banks and governments, hardly secure in “his” domicile.  If he loses his income, misses a few payments, fails to present insurance, the mortgage rate goes way up, or his town goes belly up, he is out, out, out.

Our Federal and State governments have been pursuing a course of statism over the last administration and they are focussing on this weakness in the previously unassailable right of individuals to own and hold property.  Tyranny does not require  a gun at the head or a barbed wire concentration camp, it only requires the stroke of a judge’s pen and a marshal’’s visit to your front door.  

We have certainly gone a long way from our inalienable rights.  The Constitution of Pennsylvania, in reflection of and in agreement with other states, says clearly:

“That all men are born equally free and independent, and have certain natural, inherent and inalienable rights, amongst which are, the enjoying and defending life and liberty, acquiring, possessing and protecting property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”

Also, I refer you to the following article:

The Gradual Demise of the Unalienable Right of Property

Republican Dream Team

Do we really want to beat Obama?  Do we really want to see this country return to greatness?  This kind of A List team was last seen in 1776...

Credit for this blog goes to an unknown Patriot.

How  about this for a Republican slate!!!  

Here  is a winning strategy that would set Obama and his Cronies way,  way back on their heels.  If Romney would take this advice,  it would clearly send a message to the Republican establishment  that conservatives aren’t going to do business as usual any more.  
 It  would shake the establishment, and pull together and really  energize conservative voters.  Here is a little something  else this would do…It would shake the Obama campaign to its  core.
Rather  than a leisurely march toward a VP nominee or a surprise VP  announcement like we got in 2008, vet the possible VPs NOW and  stand ready to announce the running mate in a nationally televised  press conference the day after the delegates are in  hand.  

            Allen West  Vice  President

Having  Congressman West in the VP slot makes him a TRIPLE THREAT  and a VP who WILL redefine the role.  Triple  threat?
 1.          As  the Vice President he would attend to the regular duties and be a  heartbeat away from the presidency.
2.          Vice  President West would also act as a second Secretary of State in  difficult diplomatic negotiations.
3.          AND…A  Vice President West would work in concert with the Secretary of  Defense to realign our military and redefine its role.  Triple  threat.   Oh but this is just the START of the strategy!!! 
As  soon as Romney has introduced West as the running  mate…  ROMNEY  WOULD THEN INTRODUCE HIS CHOICE FOR SECRETARY OF  STATE!…  

            John  Bolton
SECRETARY OF STATE

As  a former Ambassador to the United Nations there is nobody with a  better handle on the world’s issues or more familiar with the  players.  John Bolton is tough, straight forward and not  likely to appease ANYONE.
Now,  you have the nominees on stage, the VP choice and the Secretary of  State nominee…Let’s not stop there.  Next to walk onto the  stage…

            Sarah  Palin
Secretary of Energy.  

Palin’s  directive…Set us on the path toward energy independent in 10  years.  Anyone more invested in that goal?  Anyone who  is more knowledgeable or adept?    Can  you feel the ground starting to shake?   Next  out of the wings and onto the stage…

            General  David Petraeus
Secretary of Defense

 The  nominee for Secretary of Defense.  Enter General David  Petraeus.   As  great as he was fighting a PC war, imagine what he’ll be like once  he and West have pressed the reset button on our rules of  engagement.  In Petraeus we will have a Secretary of Defense  whose mission will be to win.  PERIOD.  When our  case is just, VICTORY IS NOT A BAD WORD!  
Oh…but  we're not done yet…..

          
 Attorney  General - Pam Bondi.

Bondi  is a no nonsense fighter who has taken on the current  administration over Obamacare and WILL clean out the corruption  rampant in that office today.  Okay,  where are we?  Who is now standing on the stage?  The  nominees so far are:  Allen West, John Bolton, Sarah Palin,  General Petreaus and Pam Bondi.  How  about a Secretary of the Treasury?  We would need someone who  has worked for YEARS in the tax field who understands the  overwhelming burden of tax codes and who has, for years fought to  restructure those codes.

            Michele  Bachmann
Secretary of the Treasury.  

By  now, fissures should be opening in the ground, rumbling coming  from the sky and the faint odor of ozone should be in the  air.   We  will need someone new…someone with new ideas to head up the  Fed.  

  

             

Please  welcome Ron Paul. Do ya' think he'd kick butt?  Do you  think the Fed would tremble?  You betcha! 

   

          
 Governor  Bobby Jindal  Secretary  of the Interior…COME  ON DOWN!!!!!

And  finally…We need someone to head up the Department of Homeland  Security.  We must have someone who understands the issues we  face.  Someone who has worked in federal law  enforcement.  Someone who won’t take any crap from  anybody.  

Please…a  round of applause for…!

         
 Sheriff  Joe Arpaio
Department of Homeland Security

Never  before has a presidential nominee entered the full-on campaign  with a fully assembled team.  Can you even imagine the  shock-and-awe wave which would be sent through the Obama regime  were the Romney to do this?    Think  about it.
Instead  of just Romney against Obama we would have:
Allen  West vs. Joe Biden
John  Bolton vs. Hillary Clinton
Sarah  Palin vs. Stephen Chu
General  Petraeus vs. Leon Panetta
Pam  Bondi vs. Eric Holder
Michele  Bachmann vs. Tim Geithner
Ron  Paul vs. Ben Bernanke
Bobby  Jindal vs. Ken Salazar
Sheriff  Joe Arpaio vs. Janet Napolitano.  

**Think  about that!**

Let  that sink in…all of them campaigning at once. There would be no  way out for Obama as each and every key player on his team would  be exposed and held to account from the word GO.  
It’s  bold,  brash  and completely against  any business as usual strategy.  Imagine!     An  entire assembled team of key cabinet positions.  Each one a  pit-bull on a T-Bone, hammering their liberal counterparts on  every issue, every day, from the word GO until November 6th,  2012.  


 
   

Light Bulbs and Ethanol

While I admire the success and promise of the X Prize for aerospace, so many government incentives are just plain stupid.  Either the agencies who propose them or the public officials who vote for them are incompetent, corrupt, or both.

One example is the L Prize offered by the US DOE for a 60-watt bulb equivalent that uses less than 10 watts, looks like the old incandescent light bulb, and must replace the standard 60 watt light bulb in fixtures.  The L Prize was specified for US-made LED lighting, since the Federal and at least one state government (California) has mandated that incandescent bulbs will not be imported, manufactured in the US (or stocked in California).  The stupidity has to do with the mandate for a bulb-looking bulb.  That shape concentrates all the heat and destroys the LED.  With half a brain, the Prize would have allowed manufacturers to make a bulb in a torus or linear or horseshoe shape, that would have done the lighting trick and met the cost and price requirements a year earlier.  To date, there is now no winner, and the only candidate has a shorter life than it should, 25,000 hours vs over 50,000 hours for most LED’s, and a price of $50 per bulb, vs a target price of $22.  If you look at the spec for the prize, you can see that someone went to a lot of trouble getting technical data for such things as dimmers, line spikes, radio emissions, and color temperatures.  Who was responsible for the thing going pear-shaped?  I’d like to know.

Ethanol is another example.  When we could buy 100% gasoline and get 22 miles per gallon, we were told that environmental requirements mandated the replacement of MTBE and leaded fuels with ethanol.  A few million rubber gaskets later, we were in compliance, at maybe 21 MPG.  Then the ethanol went up to 15% and now 20%, claiming this would cut green house gases and CO2 production because the ethanol molecule has some oxygen in it.  It’s pretty clear that growing food crops such as corn, harvesting, mashing and distilling moonshine for fuel is not only a net detriment to CO2 production, but the reduction in mileage to 18 MPG is ruining any possible net emissions benefit.  OK, we all know it’s a farm subsidy for Archer-Daniels-Midland and a few other big agro businesses. We also know its the heart of a tax and farm subsidy expense that could go a long way toward balancing our Federal budget.  We are now finding out that the ethanol content absorbs water from the air and causes rust in various engine components, especially injectors and gas tanks.  We can expect leaky gas tanks in the older vehicles we now drive, and a leaky gas tank is a giant rolling Molotov cocktail.  

The whole network of environmental incentives and disincentives needs careful scrutiny by people with more brains and fewer political objectives.  My guess is that it costs us at least a full percentage of GNP.  When GNP growth lags population growth plus service on the national debt plus government admin costs, we get poorer as a nation.  

Whenever government tilts the economic playing field with a subsidy or a restriction, it is  essentially substituting centralized planning for natural market forces.  The more this happens the less effective the market forces are going to be at restoring balance to the economy.  We learned this lesson in spades when the Feds subsidized Fannie and Freddie to become the mortgage backers of last resort.  We will soon see the results of diverting 16% of the national product through the Byzantine funnels of PPACA (Obamacare). We have so far fought valiantly to avoid the next biggest boondoggle, Cap & Trade.  

Don’t look to China’s planned economy for a different lesson.  China is moving along quickly toward a market economy, while the U.S. is moving in the opposite direction  toward a planned economy.  Why did China decide to liberalize?  They had a few decades to watch the gross distortions caused by successions of Five Year Plans and the demise for the USSR under the extremes of planned economy.  China still faces horrible distortions from past exercises in central planning in areas such as rural health care, food distribution, sanitation and housing.

Here’s a creative thought:  Politics in a democracy represent the discounted present value of future expectations.  If so, ours are in a downslide and China’s are rising. 

Malevolence

In primitive times, humans sought a cause for illness, bad weather, an unsuccessful hunt.  By externalizing the cause into a spirit, a god, or a supernatural entity, it was then possible to gain a measure of control over destiny by appeasing, sacrificing or otherwise petitioning that external entity.  Now we recognize a more scientific causal chain behind events.  

But in the case of evil, we still deal with the devil.  There are people who claim Satan is real, but cleverly disguised.  Satan, nor any other devil does not deign to appear in a wreath of sulfurous smoke just in time to be captured on a YouTube video.  There are fewer pictures of the devil than are of UFO’s.  

I’m convinced there is no external incarnation of evil.   Want to see the devil?  Look in a mirror.  Evil is an endemic disease of human beings.  It’s contagious and we are the natural carriers.

Specifically, the kind of evil I’m describing here is malevolence, the willful intent to harm another with knowledge of that harm.  

I don’t consider here the evil of earthquakes, tsunamis and tornados, nor do I consider the Christian evil of temptation, the evils of self-destructive behavior, or the evil of ignorant and inconsiderate actions.  I’m concerned about the killers, the rapists, the criminal mafiosi, the operators of Ponzi schemes and  assassins, both the kind that take life and the kind that destroy livelihoods and families by other means.  That kind of evil is malevolence, and it is a contagious disease endemic in the human population.

Susceptible humans have three built-in weaknesses that allow entry to evil:  extreme need, a weak organ of consequence, and a weak organ of empathy.

We all have needs, and most of us find ways to satisfy, substitute other things, or delay satisfaction for those needs.  Some, however, have weak resistance to perceived needs and needs dominate their thoughts and actions.  Money and sex are obvious, but the need for social acceptance and control are the most dangerous.

The consequences of the inappropriate pursuit of needs in a healthy social setting is strongly negative, but not often quick.  A healthy person will always understand that the wrong act frustrates his or her objective.  Being too direct or too blunt does not work.  Every healthy person can calculate the consequences of a bad act.  Unless, of course, the organ that does that calculation is not functioning correctly -  the organ of consequence, in other words, is weak.

What do we see when we look along the chain of consequences to see the outcome?  Have we made things harder for the ones we care about, and will we therefore get retaliation, rejection or failure?  Do we care if we hurt someone else?  Do we even know whether we are hurting someone else?   Psychologists say a symptom of autism is the inability to recognize how other people feel.  Autism is fairly common and there are many functional autistics.  On the other side of the spectrum are pathological cases, who are quite aware of others’ feelings, but have no empathy, so they use feelings to manipulate others for their own selfish purposes.  These groups have a weak organ of empathy.

So you can see that a person who cannot control his or her needs, who cannot work out the real consequences, and who cannot empathize is a crippled person who could become malevolent.  But is every such person evil?  And even if such a person commits an evil act on occasion, are they really evil?

One of the tools of modern psychology is fMRI, or functional magnetic resonance imaging.  An MRI machine can be set up to visualize the consumption of tagged glycogen in the brain to see where energy is being used.  Those are the most active neurons.  This can also be done in real time (rtfMRI), and with cleverly worked out experiments, the brain patterns involved in conditioning and habitual mental patterns are revealed.  What we see is that neural processes can be re-patterned.  The efferent dendrites that merge into a set of neurons can have their values reset;   the neurotransmitters can be depleted or enhanced, and the results will show up on rtFMRI.  For example, a bipolar patient’s brain works differently in the manic phase than in the depressive phase, and it shows up on fMRI.  If a certain pattern is repeated often enough, over time there will be a new “set” to the brain pattern.  Thus, paranoia can be ingrained, soldiers can be trained to kill, and the bubbly child becomes a cynical adult.  

Beyond the resetting of neural parameters, “plasticity” will eventually cause new neural connections to form and rewire the brain.  I propose that one such rewiring is malevolence.  It occurs in individuals with weak control over needs, a weak organ of consequence and a weak organ of empathy.  It requires a trigger, a source of infection.

Ever try to have a rational conversation with a delusional person or a someone in the debilitating stages of Alzheimer’s?  After a while you will give up.  You can’t reason with someone like that, except in rare occasions, and few will try.  You can’t share the commodity of reason with them.

Similarly, you can’t share the commodity of trust with a malevolent person.  You suspect they will try to use anything they can against you, and therefore you are wary.  The distrust hangs there, obvious to all parties, as a barrier to any form of real agreement.  The healthy individual sees this as an isolated incident, but to the infected person, this is just more evidence that his point of view is correct.  It reinforces malevolence.  Malevolence destroys trust, and lack of trust begets malevolence among the susceptible.  This is how the weak ones get infected.  

Once they are infected they find they cannot deal easily with anyone, but they are tolerated, conditionally tolerated perhaps,  by their own kind, in a sort of culture of evil.  Evil seeks out evil, and the groups that emerge form their own rules, like street gangs and drug lords.  Those groups have their own initiation rites, their hierarchy of ruthless leaders,  and enforcement by fear.  To a healthy person, this is hell.

When we incarcerate evil doers, we are simply culturing the most virulent forms of the disease.  Prison is the place where it’s best to be worst.  The baddest are better than the good.  Notice the inversion of values.  It’s not the incarceration itself that’s so difficult for prisoners, it’s the other prisoners.  Nor is it the violence of their acts.  Malevolence doesn’t always erupt into violence.  It can come out in many ways: deceit, intolerance, betrayal, protection rackets, control over food or work assignments.  Knowing that your fellow cannot be trusted and that he or she cannot trust you either, for good reason, is punishment enough.  Evil creates its own hell, it needs no help from Satan.

When a susceptible person is first exposed to a virulent malevolence, he or she often experiences a feeling of release.  it looks like a way out from personal troubles.  Then, as the pattern of evil is learned and, over time neural plasticity begins to rewire the brain, every event is seen from a perspective that is inverted from the normal view.  No one is clean, no one has anything but selfish motives, no one really gives a damn about anything but himself.  The more intelligent, the better the rationalization, but the inversion of values is still there.

What about redemption?  What about the Samaritan concept that even the worst person has a spark of good?  That all it takes is an opportunity, a second chance?  In most cases this is simply wishful thinking, but redemption occurs sporadically, “as eternal as the blade of grass that sprouts in the most barren place”.  

Plasticity works both ways, and saints are just as stubborn as sinners.

From Chernobyl to Fukushima

In conjunction with colleagues, I authored this report after Chernobyl.  Reactor design, those that have been built since then, are vastly improved in the area of safety.  Nevertheless, the idea of keeping an International Nuclear Response Team ready to go is still timely.

International Nuclear Incident Response

July 13, 1997

Prepared for International Monetary Fund

by International Nuclear Incident Response

The Need

Of the 432 nuclear power stations in operation in 29 countries (as of 1995), most have demonstrated safety levels and generate power with less environmental impact than any fossil fuel or hydroelectric stations of similar, megawatt for megawatt.  Western Europe, in particular, has no better alternative for generating electric power and, even in the aftermath of Chernobyl, no European country has renounced nuclear energy as a power source.  Nuclear power now generates roughly 20% of the world’s supply, and this dependency will increase.  There is no substitute in sight until fusion power becomes commercially feasible.  The environment impact of coal is far worse, even in terms of released radiation, than historic operation records of nuclear power plants have been in Europe and the United States.  Indeed, the record of clean nuclear power generation by Western Europe is unmatched by any coal, oil or  hydroelectric power source.

Chernobyl 4

Nevertheless, the Chernobyl incident of April 26, 1986, remains the worst industrial accident and the worst nuclear incident in history.  The release of radioactivity exceeds the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings by 200 times.  The direct and indirect ten year costs of the explosion, cleanup, crop losses, population relocation, ongoing medical expenses and the ensuing safety measures at the other Chernobyl plants which remain in operation are about $400 billion US and the twenty year cost will probably total one half trillion dollars US.  Thirty‑one lives were  lost and about 155 more people among the 800,000 who are considered part of the liquidation crew, are suffering from acute  radiation sickness.  Practically 72% of the liquidators are in poor health today.  Another 5,237 people in the area are disabled for reasons stemming from the disaster.  Twenty‑four thousand five hundred square kilometers of land, which includes some of the world’s best cropland, are contaminated at levels considered dangerous and will remain dangerous for at least two generations.  About 225,000 people have been evacuated and resettled, and this is not enough.  2.4 million people now live on land considered contaminated.  Children of the residents within the 30 kilometer zone have mutations which will be passed on to further generations.  Thyroid cancer in the children who were under 8 years old at the time of the disaster are 200 times normal.  One hundred ninety‑two metric tonnes of enriched uranium and plutonium were in that core, and 80 percent was blown into the environment.  The estimated release amounted to 6.4 billion curies.  One curie carried in one’s pocket will kill with a probability of 50%.  The hastily erected steel and concrete sarcophagus is beginning to crumble, leaks are increasing, and it is possible that the pool of uncontrolled fuel may be melted into a puddle at the bottom of the mess and could cause another explosion.

Chernobyl Impact

The Chernobyl incident was a significant factor in the breakup of the USSR.  It would be a destabilizing influence in any country.  The costs of such an incident, even when borne by the international community as it had been for Chernobyl, still acts as a major brake on the local and regional economies.  Ensuing economic hardships aggravate the economic instability, creating an irresistible political force.

Risk Assessment

There are 18  RBMK reactors similar to Chernobyl still operating in Eastern Europe and Russia.  In addition there are six more graphite‑moderated power reactors operating in other parts of the world.  These reactors are unstable at low power output and have a tendency to develop hot spots leading to thermal runaway conditions and may escalate to the hydrogen explosion and burning graphite that destroyed Chernobyl 4.  Worse, they do not have true containment structures, which would have kept Chernobyl from spewing its core.  Over the next twenty years we can expect two more Level Seven incidents from these reactors.  A Level Seven incident results in major damage and serious loss of life.  The unmitigated costs of these events would probably be similar to Chernobyl.

In addition, we can expect about ten events of Level Four and above over the next twenty years, resulting in loss of life and requiring an emergency response for radiation leakage.  The reactor meltdown at Three Mile Island was a Level Five incident.  These could occur in any of the aging boiling water reactors common in the United States and elsewhere, especially where containment vessels are showing signs of deterioration.  Finally, there are an unknown number of nuclear powered vessels in the world, including icebreakers and military transports using pressurized water reactors.  Russia, in particular, intends to build many of these for floating power generation and export to other countries.  The record of these PWR reactors is not public and no estimate of the risk is possible here.  We suspect, however, that the major risk is the risk of refueling, transport and storage of the fuel rods.

These Level Four, Five and Six incidents may result in costs of $2 billion US to $20 billion US each, if left to normal mitigation.

In total, the international costs associated with nuclear incidents, in our estimation, may reach $1.8 trillion US in the next twenty years, including Chernobyl, at demonstrated mitigation levels.  We propose to reduce this cost and risk by a large factor using a number of methods developed with the hindsight of Chernobyl. 

Treaties and Politics

Politically, the nations of the world have looked at nuclear incidents as a byproduct of war and its preparations.  The major risks today seem to be squarely in the utilitarian, even commercial, domain.  The major international treaty which commits the nuclear‑capable countries to some level of responsibility is the Nuclear Non‑Proliferation Treaty, which requires immediate disclosure of nuclear incidents and cooperation in the mitigation of effects.  More recently, this position was reinforced by the Convention on Early Notification and the Convention on Assistance in Case of a Nuclear Accident or Radiological Emergency.  These were drafted in response to Chernobyl and are now in effect. Finally, the dumping of low‑level radioactive wastes is addressed by the 1993 Amendment to the London Convention on Radioactive Material Dumping, which has not been ratified yet by Russia.

In every nuclear incident there has historically been reluctance on the part of the country involved to advertise details of its plight to the very nations that it needs for assistance.  There have been no international accredited institutions without political affiliations capable of meaningful response, except, perhaps, International Red Cross/ Red Crescent, in its area of expertise.  The unhesitating use of Red Cross because of its helpfulness and lack of political affiliation, is indicative.

Trustees of INIR are American, Polish, Ukrainian, and more.  We are pursuing an international charter, international siting, international sources of funding and an international agenda.  Our goal is to remediate and mitigate the damage from nuclear incidents without regard to affiliation or citizenship. 

Methods and Technologies

INIR is being formed to mitigate and remediate environmental damage from nuclear incidents and, where possible, nuclear waste incidental to such incidents.  Our methods rely on several new technologies that were not available at Chernobyl and which, in retrospect, would have substantially reduced the death toll, time to recovery, and costs of this disaster.  These methods are:

            1. Creation of an internationally chartered private foundation (non‑profit) without a political agenda, to respond quickly to nuclear incidents wherever in the world they might occur.

            2.  Maintain a fleet of Boeing 747‑200 and Russian AN‑147 heavy lift airplanes at two major sites in the world (Anchorage and Amsterdam ‑ six aircraft total), together with the specialized equipment, crew and staff to be set up onsite within twenty‑four hours of a reported incident.  These aircraft will be especially set up with roll‑on, roll‑off capability and raw materials bins.

            3.  Keep on file the construction details of every registered reactor type in such form that it can be quickly used for finite element analysis of weaknesses and repairs.  Duplicate the files and computation facilities so that a FEM technician and computer is onsite in the first plane load.

            4.  Build a pair of SulPol factories in roll‑on, roll‑off containers that will fly to the incident site and set up a SulPol factory in twenty‑four hours.

            4.  Use of SulPol, a polymerized sulfur formulation, to strengthen the outer layers of the Chernobyl sarcophagus and fill cracks in containment vessels prone to weathering, porosity, and oozing of lubricants.  SulPol does not require water and sets in twenty minutes.  It is two to four times stronger than concrete and does not shrink upon curing.  It adheres to aggregate with five times the tenacity of concrete.  It is thermally non‑conductive, self‑extinguishing and completely non‑toxic.  One of the  locally obtainable  ingredients is used engine oil.

            5.  Use of SulPol to encapsulate high‑level radionuclides recovered from adjacent areas on site.

            6.  Use of SulPol to create water barriers and surface water containments to prevent leaching of mobile radionuclides and fission products into the water table.  SulPol is impervious to water and can be formed underwater.

            7.  Development and maintenance of a number of robot probes capable of entering moderate radiation areas inaccessible to humans for damage  assessment.  Each team would also have a few Unmanned Aerial Vehicles to survey buildings from aloft and sample plumes, and quickly map radioactivity in the surrounding area. Each of these would be equipped with GPS satellite location and self‑contained DR systems to map the information back to a central computer.  In this manner a reliable site estimate could be worked up quickly.  The telemetry and remote control technologies will be similar to those developed for the Mars Sojourner probe.  The probes would carry video cameras and radiation instruments, a sophisticated radio capable of coding a weak signal for clear communication through barriers and transponders, a programmable onboard response system, and autonomous safety systems.  One of the devices is an extrudable probe with sensors that can be poked around corners or obstacles.  Another is a tiny radio transponder that can be dropped on command to ensure communication inside shielded buildings.  Finally, a short‑lived disposable sensing grenade can be “tossed” into areas so hot even the probe could not operate there.

            8.  Soils contaminated with cesium 137, strontium 90 and radionuclides, including transuranic radionuclides, can be remediated with one or more crops of Rapeseed, which seems to have an affinity for heavy elements, grows quickly and is quite hardy.   Rapeseed is rich is combustible oils which not only power the incinerator but may yield some useful waste heat.  The plants are then harvested, incinerated in ovens with exhaust scrubbers, and the radioactive ashes mixed with SulPol and buried in prepared partitions in the sarcophagus.  Soils so heavily contaminated that they would be uninhabitable for generations may be remediated in this way in a year or two.

            9.  Similarly, ponds and pools can be remediated with water hyacinth, a plant so hardy as to be considered a pest.  The plants are then dredged from the water and incinerated similar to the Rapeseed.  Reduction of waterborne contaminants is essential to keep them out of aquifers and rivers.  The lack of such a solution threatens the Dnieper, near Chernobyl,  and perhaps the Black Sea today.

            10.  Maintain a research staff to further refine methods, strategies and technologies in the above areas and incorporate useful methods and technologies as they become available.

Technology

The technologies proposed for INIR are unique in their assemblage for the purpose of Nuclear Incident Response.  None are new or unproven.

Strategic Deployment

Anchorage, Alaska and Amsterdam, Holland have been chosen to base duplicate fleets of three planes each, in order to minimize travel time and refueling stops.  Anchorage is within non‑stop travel time for a 747 to the entire Pacific Rim, including the Kamchatka and China.  Amsterdam is a short flight to all parts of the Europe and Western Russia, including the Russian fleet storage area at Andreeva.  The only unprotected parts of the world are in the Southern Hemisphere.  As they develop the requirement, a fleet will be deployed there, perhaps in Australia. 

One of the considerations of the site choice is access by all the nuclear powers without fear of interdiction and reasonable customs laws, as well as being desirable sites for people to live when they are not risking their lives.

Each heavy lift aircraft can carry 35 to 45 metric tonnes (80,000 to 100,000 lbs) of cargo, depending on the fuel requirement for the flight.  The planes have been chosen for their reliability and are, even so, backed up with a spare. 

SulPol plants are contained in two or three 40 foot containers that roll on the planes with undercarriage dollies that are pulled by truck tractors.  Each site will have a SulPol plant and spare parts.

The operations HQ is another 40' container, complete with independent diesel power generators and computers.  Part of this container is the ROV/UAV lab with the robots and their gear, ready to make on the spot repairs and modifications.

Two aircraft will arrive onsite with the SulPol plant and the HQ container.  These will deploy immediately.  Subsequent trips will bring in raw materials, if needed, cranes and special SulPol applications equipment, and more personnel.  The third aircraft will remain in the home port for backup unless a Level Seven response is required.

SulPol Polymerized Sulfur

SulPol is a patented superior formulation for polymerized sulfur.  It is 97% sulfur.  No water is used in the formulation and it is therefore useable in dry areas or where water is contaminated or the utilities are inoperable.  It is at least twice as strong as concrete, binds very aggressively to a large number of aggregates, and is impervious to environmental organic acids and alkalis, salt and fresh water.  Aggregated with lead from old car batteries and boron ( used in reactor moderator rods), it is seven times better at stopping radiation than concrete per unit thickness.  It is not damaged by secondary decay from neutron radiation such as emitted by reactor cores.  A thermoplastic, it is tough and not brittle.  It is immune to the alkali reaction which weakens concrete.  It is thermally non‑conductive and self‑extinguishing.  It melts at 120 degrees C. and is therefore normally not used to encapsulate high‑level reactor wastes when there is a possibility of generated heat.

It is environmentally stable, non‑polluting and non‑toxic.  The formulation can include used motor oil, an otherwise noxious waste product.

Bioremediation of Nuclear Contamination

Data to be supplied by Bohdan.

Remote Telemetry Probes

Crawling through narrow cracks and fissures in a crumbling building too radioactive for humans in protected clothing, a small, cat‑sized probe can go where no one has gone before, such as the surface of Mars.  These are quite distant relatives of the radio controlled vehicles sold in hobbyist stores.  We will require two generic types: ROV’s (Remote Operated Vehicles), which are semi‑autonomous, remotely directed telemetry stations on wheels; and UAV’s (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles the size of a large model airplane), which are less autonomous remotely piloted surveyors on wings.  Each response team will have two complete ROV’s, two complete UAV’s, spare parts, and a repair/modification lab.  Along with the operators will be software and hardware specialists for similar purposes.

Some situations may require an remote underwater vehicle, but we intend to carry sufficient spare parts to assemble an instrumented underwater probe without remote capability.  Most of the sites have rather shallow storage pools and water is a good absorber of radiation.

ROV’s

The six‑wheeled configuration with an articulated chassis similar to the Martian Sojourner is quite good at negotiating broken terrain strewn with debris.  The vehicle, which we will call MUSKRAT because of its sinuous movements, will be preloaded with a route and can follow that route autonomously unless overridden by the operator.  On the operator’s screen, he/she will draw a route through a diagram of the building.  The computer interface will compile that route to a series of movement commands that the MUSKRAT will follow.  Instantaneous telemetry will allow the operator to see whatever MUSKRAT sees; a small video camera with 40:1 telephoto capability and a steadying device will be mounted in a low forward‑looking position.  The lens will be protected from smearing by a number of cover slides that can be dropped one at a time on operator command when the camera’s vision becomes obscured.  A three‑axis periscope can be inserted into the visual path for elevating the view without endangering the camera.  The same periscope can be used for distance ranging by simply converging two superimposed views of an object similar to the mariner’s sextant.

MUSKRAT will carry an extrudable snout about 1.5 meters long with a tiny wide angle TV camera on the tip.  Controlled by motor‑actuated tendons in a manner analogous to an elephant’s trunk, this device will allow MUSKRAT to peer around corners and obstacles safely.  The snout camera, as well as the main camera, will have infrared sensitivity sufficient to see dangerously high temperatures, and will be equipped with IR filters to perform this operation.

In the body of MUSKRAT will be a crude gamma ray spectrometer capable of determining the nature of the radioactive substances, and a rate dosimeter to determine the strength of the source.  Sound, temperature, air velocity and direction, and subsonics transmitted through the wheels will complete MUSKRAT’s instrumentation.

Communication to and from MUSKRAT will be by frequency‑agile, 20 centimeter full duplex radio, developed from existing cellular telephone technologies and using similar error protection codes.  Video out will use JPEG bandwidth compression, decompressed by standard commercially available chips in the operator’s station. A secondary subchannel will carry data from the other instruments which will be polled on a standard commercial GPIB bus interface.

MUSKRAT will calculate its position, when possible, by onboard GPS, a standard commercial version.  Once out of satellite view, MUSKRAT will calculate its DR position by keeping track of wheel revolutions and turns.  The vehicle’s exact position will be displayed on the operators’s console.

The operator’s console will be a customized commercial notebook computer with PCMCIA interface cards to the communications gear and special software developed from commercial navigation programs and CAD software.  At deployment it will be downloaded from the mainframe files with the best available 3D drawings of the building, converted to the format required for MUSKRAT.

Inside a steel‑shelled building, MUSKRAT’s direct radio communications will be shielded.  Therefore, at intervals determined by the operator or preprogrammed, MUSKRAT will drop one of its three transponders and shift to another frequency.  The transponders will relay communications around corners.

However rugged, MUSKRAT will encounter environments in which it would not survive.  Nevertheless, some data will be necessary from these areas.  MUSKRAT will therefore carry a small compressed air launcher (“FORE”), precalibrated with a selection of trajectories and exit velocities, to throw a golf‑ball sized miniprobe into hot spots.  We have devised a tiny high flux rate dosimeter and a very simple crude gamma ray spectrometer to fit into the golf ball.  The surface of the golf ball will have a fuzzy texture to minimize rolling and will be marked with targets suitable for optical ranging from MUSKRAT.  Upon ejection they will deploy three stubby antennas for one‑way communication to MUSKRAT.  These golf balls are designed to survive only long enough to get a series of instrument readings.  MUSKRAT will carry several of them.

MUSKRAT’s outer shell will be a disposable plastic chosen to be resistant to contamination.

UAV’s

We visualize the UAV as a rather large model airplane chosen for low airspeed stability and easy handling and capable of a five pound payload, possibly a biplane, and an eight hour (one shift) endurance.  We have therefore dubbed it LINDBERGH.  The airborne unit will be in constant real‑time communication with the operator’s console, unlike MUSKRAT.  It will be instrumented with the usual flight instruments in electronic form:  artificial horizon, barometric altimeter, airspeed, stall warning.  By telemetry, we will be able to implement a two axis autopilot simply by adding control software to the operator’s console, which will otherwise be similar to the MUSKRAT console.  However, the LINDBERGH console will have a provision for two‑person control: an operator and an observer.  The observer will keep watch via LINDBERGH’s observation camera, steerable by mirror in the belly of the plane.  With a joystick he/she can zoom and pan to keep a passing object in view.  The operator can accomplish this objective on solo flights by laying out a search pattern on a topographic grid and turning on the autopilot, leaving LINDBERGH under automatic control for direction and altitude.

LINDBERGH will carry a forward piloting camera similar to MUSKRAT’s snout camera, a more sensitive gamma ray spectrometer and rate dosimeter, and an onboard GPS.  LINDBERGH will also carry a small vacuum apparatus and several sampling bottles in order to sample smoke plumes and dust particles for laboratory analysis.

LINDBERGH’s assignments will include aerial building survey and land contamination survey in order to get quick assessments for leakage and bioremediation possibilities.

Containment Vessels and Sarcophagus Modeling

NASTRAN running on a 50‑100 megaflop supermini the size of a packing crate.  Two technician’s consoles, a RAID5 100MB disk array, IR and 100Xten connections to the ROV/UAV consoles.  Special tools for rapid estimation.  Shapes and materials lib for SulPol.  ROV/UAV compilers/downloaders.

Contaminant Mapping

3D false color topos from collected UAV data conformed to local topographical data, on a GPS grid.  Project analysis: too hot, salvageable, too dilute.  Best cost and time effective strategies.  Weather and climate data for plants. Population demographics and classification for environmental dependency (urban, rural, farm, fishing, etc.).

Personnel Dosimetry

Rate vs total dose.  Real‑time Becquerel counters with totalizers and UPC scanout in a cheap badge.  Bioassay dosimetry vs a badge.  Bioassay implants with real‑time readout.

Dose management in operations personnel, INIR personnel, and affected citizenry.  Food intake, air and water dosimetry using the same dosimeters and a software analysis

Funding Requirements

Funding for INIR would be primarily from the IMF and related sources.  A small stream of revenues may result from licenses and insurance recoveries where available and from private sources through donations (INIR will be a United States 501 (c) (3) charitable organization), but there is no private source sufficient to fund this program.  In fact, without INIR and its like, there is no way for the international community to insure against a common risk that is really part of the cost of nuclear power.  Without INIR, no government of a nuclear‑powered nation can honestly represent the interests and protect the civil rights of its citizens and may be forced to respond inefficiently in areas in which it is poorly equipped at its own enormous expense.

Summary of Funding Requirements: Ten Years (in $ millions US):

	97	98	99	00	01	02	03	04	05	06	07 thru 17
Ops	2350	3000	3000	3000	3000	3000	3000	3000	3000	3000	3000
Equip	450	50	250	25	25	25	400	25	250	25	25
R&D	25	50	50	50	50	50	50	50	50	50	50
Admin	10	10	10	10	10	10	10	10	10	10	10
Total	2835	3060	3310	3085	3085	3085	3460	3085	3310	3085	3085

Categories:

OPS (operations) is the fund from which response teams operate.  This sum is kept in trust and allocated as needed for incident responses. The first three years reflect a buildup of this fund.  A Level Seven response is estimated at $5 billion US; a Level Five response is estimated at $1 billion US.  Funding for the repair of the Chernobyl sarcophagus is included in 1997.

Equip (equipment) includes six heavy lift airplanes with RoRo modifications at $50 million each, two transportable SulPol plants, 4 remote operated SulPol applications cranes,  4 ROV’s and 4 UAV’s, and the two mobile computer/telemetry centers.

R&D (research and development) includes ROV and UAV development, purchase of software and training for the FEM power station models, SulPol process applications improvements, reinforcing materials and underwater chemistry, and site equipment development.

Admin (administration) includes office space, insurance, salaries and wages, fees, legal, and related ongoing expenses not part of an operation.

Founding Trustees

Subsequent to funding, this list will change.  However, the founders, by virtue of their abiding interest in this program, are committed to participate on any level appropriate.

Bohdan Zakiewicz

Dr. Zakiewicz is the inventor and patent holder of SulPol.  A Polish national who commutes to California, Dr. Zakiewicz has written a proposal for the repair of the damaged sarcophagus at Chernobyl 4 which has been recommended by the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and was given a $3.1 billion US grant by the Group 7 countries for this project.  The grant remains unfunded, however, and it appears it will be used for other purposes not directly related to the repair. 

Dr. Zakiewicz is also the major contributor to the bioremediation technology.  His background in chemistry and mineral processing is central to this proposal.

Vladimir M. Chernousenko

Dr, Chernousenko was head of the liquidators in the 10 km “Special Zone” surrounding Chernobyl and the author of “Chernobyl, Insight from the Inside” (1991, Springer Verlag).  He is also a member of the Ukrainian Institute for Theoretical Physics.  Few, if any people left alive today have more scientific and practical insight into the methods of this proposal.

Dr, Chernousenko has not yet consented to this appointment, but we have hopes he will.

Ken Brody

Mr. Brody, a former physicist and computer scientist, is best known for the design of the Tricon‑1 fault‑tolerant computer, which was designed to prevent such cockpit errors as the one which destroyed Three Mile Island.  Emergency shutdown installations all over the world use this computer system.

He is the major contributor in robotics and computer systems and the author of this grant proposal.  He is an American citizen residing in California.

Lee Bray

Captain Bray is the senior pilot for American Express, flying a Boeing 727‑200.  He knows every major airport in the world, the intimate details of creating and servicing a fleet of heavy‑lift airplanes, the costs, FAA and international requirements, and the necessary modifications to achieve our goals. His contribution to the logistics and deployment of our response team is essential.

He is a former Flying Tiger pilot.  He is an American citizen residing in Anchorage, Alaska.

Addenda

SulPol Characteristics

Radionuclides and Half Lives

Reactor cores contain, initially, enriched uranium:  natural uranium, mostly ²³⁸U₉₂ enriched with a few percent of    ²³⁵U₉₂ or an artificial element, plutonium ²⁴⁴Pu₉₄, in the form of metallic pellets or uranium oxide inserted into a rod.  While radioactive and poisonous, by themselves the fuel rods are not producing much energy, although they may be warm.  They emit gamma rays, electrons and helium nuclei (beta and alpha particles), but especially they emit neutrons  which are moving too fast to be useful.  Using water or a graphite moderator to slow the neutrons down allows them to be absorbed by other nearby uranium atoms making those atoms unstable.  The unstable atoms split (fission) in a number of ways, leaving radioactive isotopes of thorium, radium, radon, lead, strontium, cesium and others (radionuclides).  Most important, each uranium fission produces two new neutrons capable of causing further fissions.  If there are enough slow neutrons and enough nearby uranium atoms, the chain reaction becomes self‑sustaining.  The masses of the fission products are a few percent less than their parent atom.  This lost mass is converted into energy by the famous equation E=mc².  The c in the equation is the speed of light, so the tiny mass loss is multiplied by 9 x 10¹⁶ which accounts for the tremendous energy of a fission reactor.  The chain reaction is controlled by absorbing some of the neutrons in control rods usually containing boron.  Sliding these rods in and out of the reactor is the main control on energy output.

When the reactor is operating, the radionuclides accumulate in the fuel rods and some of the other atoms in the reactor may become radioactive as well.  In general, elements below thorium (element 90) in the periodic table do not spontaneously fission, although most have radioactive isotopes.  The isotopes vary greatly in their stability, which we describe as the time it takes half of them to decay, or half‑life.  In order to be dangerous to the environment, the half‑life must be longer than a few hours and the emitted radiation must be powerful enough to cause biological damage.  A beta ray (high speed electron) must be 70 keV (thousand electron volts) to penetrate skin.  However, if the radioactive isotope can be absorbed into tissue, there is no protection from even weak radiation.  Therefore, certain moderate life radionuclides that can be absorbed into the food chain are considered the most dangerous.  These are strontium ⁹⁰Sr₃₈ and cesium  ¹³⁷Cs₅₅, which are incorporated into bone and connective tissue in small quantities but enough to cause biological damage.  In addition, there are some short‑lived isotopes of iodine that are absorbed into the thyroid, causing serious problems in small children under the age of eight.  Making sure there is plenty of non radioactive iodine in the body with iodine tablets can greatly lessen this problem.

When a reactor spews its core into the environment, the unspent fuel and its high mass fission products (transuranic radionuclides) and lower mass bioactive radioisotopes are released.  Radon is a heavy gas, and travels on the wind.  Smoke sized particles, mostly lighter isotopes, can be wind‑borne and if conditions are right they will reach the high‑level steering winds and the jet stream and circle the globe, although this is unlikely.  Locally, particles “fall out” of the air and coat the ground, where moisture and rain can carry them deeper.  Therefore a core explosion tends to cause a very local fallout of transuranic isotopes and as well as more regional and, perhaps, international contamination due to strontium, cesium and iodine.  Rain, snow and water movements may spread the contaminants until at last they are either diluted to safe levels or they are no longer radioactive.  It is the generally accepted practice to clean up and dispose of, as far as possible, transuranic isotopes and sequester the remaining heavily contaminated areas forever, and to remove as much of the moderately contaminated lighter radionuclides as possible from contact with potable water and populations of  humans and wildlife.  INIR has methods to expedite this basic strategy.

Transuranic radionuclides consist of a number of isotopes whose half lives range up to 700 million years, which, of course, is why they are still around.  All are intensely powerful radiation emitters, with alpha particles, beta particles commonly in the 3 to 8 MEV range, and gamma radiation.

The dangerous isotope of iodine,¹²⁶I₅₃  , has a half life of 13 days, but a weak isotope, ¹²⁹I₅₃ has a half life of 17 million years.  Half lives for ⁹⁰Sr₃₈     and  ¹³⁷Cs₅₅  ,respectively, are 29.1 years and 30.2 years, although there are other isotopes with shorter lives that are dangerous as well.  These are beta emitters typically in the .2 to 2.5 MEV range and produce some gamma radiation as well.

It is possible to clearly identify a radioactive contaminant by its gamma ray spectrum, since this form of radiation is not easily shielded by soil or vegetation.

Radioactivity Units

The detection of one radiation particle is a Becquerel (Bq), the Standard International (SI) unit of radiation.  Most of us are more familiar with the common standard, the Curie (Ci), which is 3.7 x 10⁷ Bq.  These units measure the total amount of radioactive material, which would ordinarily be emitted over the lives of the isotopes.

The Gray (Gy) is the SI unit of absorbed dose.  It depends on how many radiation particles strikes each kilo of flesh.  The common standard is the rad, which is .01 Gy.

To confuse the issue further, not all the radiation you get gets you.  Some passes through, some does not penetrate.  Therefore there is a unit for the biological equivalent dose, the sievert (Sv), which converts to the more common rem: 1 rem = .01 Sv.  A lifetime safe radiation dose is considered about 37 rem or .37 Sv.  Natural sources, such as cosmic rays and radiation from rocks, can account for 12 to 20 rem.

An electron volt is the measure of the velocity of a particle.  A beta ray is a fast electron moving close enough to the speed of light so it emits a kind of shock wave, or Bremstrahlung, as it passes through a medium as dense as air.  Electrons of at least 70 keV are required to penetrate the epidermis.  Alpha particles, being far heavier, move more slowly.  Alpha particles of 7.5 MeV are required to penetrate skin.

Basic Reactor Types

Bibliography

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